Honey in the Tape Deck

From the author of the groundbreaking and bestselling debut The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather which took the poetry world by storm, to the follow-up initially banned instant classic multi-media extravaganza PAIN: The Board Game, comes the eagerly anticipated collection Honey In the Tape Deck: New & Uncollected Poems. Over 10 years in the making, which for the first time collects and compiles the very best of over 20 years of Starkweather's enthralling poetry and writing. A stunning range of over 200 pages of rare gems, and out-of-print underground cult classics from Starkweather's trademark hilarious wit and comic genius to the lyric sublime, absurd, surreal, and cinematic poems, thought-provoking but always personal with a fractured narrative leaving vivid images and beautiful domestic debris, a barrage of seemingly impossible images and breathtaking metaphor set to an unimaginable music and infectious inviting rhythm. Honey is simultaneously tender, revolutionary, dire, heartbreaking, with chiseled diamond-like precision, breath-taking line breaks and un-heard-of or allowed moves and gestures and rule breaking, and most importantly, always timeless poems that are useful and instructive and healing in any era. The writing takes all kinds of forms: prose poems, book-length poems, aphorisms, lyric elegy, narrative, stories in verse, plays, anti-poems, manifestos, dreams, there is literally something for everyone. Starkweather's writing is always generous and inviting, bringing the reader along, like a cloaked guide to the night, to life, to possibility, beckoning, come, follow me, enter. In the poetry there is a reckoning with death that is imbued with light and life, and a rebuke of what is possible with language that is charged with its possibilities. Plain spoken, contemporary, charged with its own indefinable energy, an amalgamation of madness, clarity and ambition, the poems journey through longing and nostalgia, revealing like a thick red curtain suddenly flung open, a brilliance of unexplored experience and thought. Starkweather's poems in Honey in the Tape Deck are full of a sense of play and surprise, always pushing the bounds and limits of imagination, language and of what's possible in a poem (and we all know anything can happen in a poem!): Horses escaping on an LA Freeway, looting dust from the museum of the moon, a green bull sitting in a red corvette at a stop light, rain that goes the wrong way, drinking a beer and reading poems with the incredible Hulk, every bullet ever reversing back into their barrels, back into soft metals, back into the earth to sleep for eternity...inviting us into it's wild generous dream.